


Harry Potter and the One Big Headache

by dashdashdashing



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, 七つの大罪 - 鈴木央 | Nanatsu no Taizai | The Seven Deadly Sins - Suzuki Nakaba (Anime & Manga)
Genre: I don't know how tags work, Immortal Ban, Master of Death Harry, Paperwork, Swearing, just for fun, sassy friendship - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:14:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26263231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dashdashdashing/pseuds/dashdashdashing
Summary: What do you get when you cross fandoms, immortals, and a sassy-yet-apathetic primordial being?I don't know either, but enjoy whatever this is!
Kudos: 70





	Harry Potter and the One Big Headache

**Author's Note:**

> First post here on AO3, enjoy!

“Welcome back,” Harry greeted, busying himself with a tumbler of fire-whiskey. He poured two glasses and approached the slightly befuddled looking man that had just blinked into existence in his office, shoving the drink into his hand. “Drink, and don’t ask. It’s not like you’ll remember and I hate repeating myself over and over again.”

The other man downed the drink in one go before croaking out a confused, “What?”

Harry rolled his eyes, sipping at his own drink with one hand and snapping his fingers with the other. Two plush leather chairs appeared from thin air and he sunk into one with a grateful sigh. “May as well get comfortable while you’re here. It won’t be long ‘til you go back.”  
“Does anything you say make sense?” Ban asked, seating himself. His bright red leather outfit clashed horribly with the brown, but for some reason Harry could never conjure any other type of chair, or colour.

Besides, at least the man had died _wearing_ clothes this time.

One thing Harry had found quite fascinating about the immortal being in front of him was that he never really questioned the power Harry often displayed. He just took it in stride each and every time he appeared. Sometimes he’d appear multiple times in a row, other times Harry wouldn’t see the man for months.

The one constant was that Ban – an immortal bandit, according to one of their ages past conversations – would never remember anything about Harry, or what happened whilst his soul was in limbo, waiting for his physical body to repair itself enough to house it again.

“So, what happened this time?” Harry asked curiously. “A drunken giant got a little too stomp happy? Run into the pointy end of a sword again? Maybe a little stumble off a cliff face?”

“A pissed off fairy king, actually,” Ban replied drily before frowning slightly to himself, like he wasn’t sure why he was acting so chummy with a stranger.

Harry hummed, swirling his whiskey, poison green eyes watching the amber liquid as he gestured for the tumbler to refill Ban’s glass. The Bandit made a noise of appreciation, raising his glass slightly in toast before taking a gulp. He grimaced and started to rub his stomach before his body jerked, as if pulled by a string through his navel.

There was a deflated _pop_ sound and Ban’s soul was gone, his glass of whiskey shattering on the floor.

Harry sighed and banished the chair and the mess with a wave of his hand. “What a waste of good whiskey.”

He was grumbling to himself when a half-naked Ban next appeared, blinking stupidly at his sudden change in surroundings.

Harry pointed to a nearby chair with his pitch-black quill. “Sit down and shut up.”  
With a sneer, Ban did what he was told.

In Harry’s domain his word was law, his will was absolute, and his duties never ending. Being the Master of Death didn’t exactly mean he could take a holiday.

“Nice place you got here,” Ban said after a few moments of silence, draping himself across the chair and looking completely at ease propping his dirty feet on Harry’s coffee table.

Harry shot the man an irritated look as he signed off on another stack of papers. “If I had a sickle for every time I heard that one…”

“So, where am I exactly?”

“My office.”  
“And that is where?”

“Purgatory. Or better yet, the plane between life and death.”  
“Like the Necropolis?”

“No,” Harry murmured, chewing the end of his quill as he frowned at a recently dead man’s life profile, and his ultimately grisly demise by exploding after consuming demonic flesh. Quite a few of those had come across his desk lately, come to think of it. “The Necropolis is… a proxy plane of existence, I guess you could say. It’s accessible to the living but it is not the final resting place. Like a pit stop for weary souls before they come to me. Helps a lot if I’m backlogged on sorting and filing.”

“… Ah.”

Ban glanced around lazily, taking in the bookshelves framing a rather large fireplace spitting green flames, the leather chairs, Harry’s own massive mahogany desk and archaic writing tools. Despite the crackling fire, there was no real sense of warmth in the place, nor any specific source of light. Looking a little closer, the shadows seemed to be deeper than what they should be.

“So, what’s your name?”

“No point in me telling you that since you’ll be leaving in approximately thirteen point four seconds.”

“Rude.”

Harry snorted, snapping his fingers. Ban jumped off his chair, defensive, when a black spectre appeared at Harry’s elbow. With a swipe of a smoky appendage, the stack of recently signed papers was gone, replaced with a slightly smaller, newer pile.

“What the hell was that?” Ban snapped.

“Hm?” Harry blinked, glancing up from his paperwork. He looked amused when he took in Ban’s tense form. “You’re awfully jumpy. No wonder, considering how you died this time.”  
“ _This_ time?” Ban asked confusedly. “We’ve just met.”

Ah, Harry had forgotten how dense Ban could be at times. He’d been seeing the bandit so often lately, sometimes once every few minutes, that he’d gotten used to starting their conversation where it had left off. Not that the man could remember what they’d talked about before. Ban’s soul was a clean slate each time he appeared in Harry’s office, even if it did remember the barest of impressions from their frequent exchanges. It made for a refreshing change of pace, considering the rest of his social circle was largely made of simpering, slobbering, ghostly minions.

Most souls only flitted through purgatory before going towards their prospective and most appropriate afterlives. It was only the ones who had done extraordinary things in their life that took a little longer to be sorted, whether those things were bad or good.

Death was the ultimate neutral, and so was its Master.

Harry could still remember when Death sheepishly – well, as sheepish as a sexless, formless primordial being could be, anyways – told him that a soul had gone back to earth in the same form it had departed from.

Most people who died and then came back touted about ‘seeing the other side’ when in reality they hadn’t even made it past Harry’s front door. If they were lucky, it only happened once in their lifetime before they passed on finally.

He’d thought it was another run of the mill reincarnation that had gone a little wonky since the soul had already begun moving on, until it kept happening. The same soul would flicker through purgatory, brush against the gates of the afterlife before disappearing back to the realm of the living.

Same soul, same form. Each and every single time.

Curiosity had gnawed at him until he told Death to just send the finicky soul to his office from then on. It wasn’t exactly procedure, but Harry was never really one to follow the rules. Plus he was getting annoyed with having to fill out a completely redundant form, all for the sake of keeping track of souls and filing.

Cue Ban.

One look at the man’s soul had answered all of Harry’s questions. He had been slightly shocked that someone had managed to drink from the Fountain of Youth – though it explained why he felt part of the fairy realm withering away slowly but surely in the last century or so – but Harry could tell a good soul from a bad one.

Ban wasn’t a saint, but his soul was a good one.

The bandit opened his mouth to speak but Harry beat him to it.

“See you soon.”  
Ban flickered out of sight.

Ink stained Harry’s fingers as he flicked through some reports, brows furrowed as puzzle pieces started to form a rather irritating picture.

He slapped his hands on the table and shot to his feet, chair crashing to the ground. “ _Death!_ ”

The deity appeared before the word had finished being spoken, the smoky spectre blending with the shadows yet standing out from them all at once. “Yes, my Master?”

“The fuck is going on up there, huh?” Harry snapped, waving the reports under the being’s nose. “People are exploding like fucking cherry bombs! Last I checked, demon flesh wasn’t exactly fit for consumption so what the fuck?!”

“Language,” Death chided, voice both female and male and yet neither.

Harry slapped the papers onto his desk and instead of reaching out to strangle a being that could simply think him out of existence, settled on massaging his aching temples instead. “Sorry,” he bit out, “but do you have any idea of what’s going on?”

“Yes.”

Harry waited for an elaboration that didn’t come. He could feel the migraine creeping in already. “… and?”

“The situation requires no interference from us, my Master. Death comes for all in the end.”

“Fucking peachy,” Harry replied drily, not looking forward to the future paperwork. “And what would happen if the situation _does_ take a turn for the worst, huh?”

“Then we shall observe.”

“Basically, we just watch and take whatever comes with a grain of salt?”

Death shrugged. Wonderful, because _that_ answered everything.


End file.
